Conventionally, in a mounting process for IC cards or the like, a plastic film base material is used as the base material to be processed. The schematic structure of the film base material is shown in FIG. 11. FIG. 11 shows a plan view of part of the film base material. The film base material 1 is band-shaped and includes section regions 2 consecutive in its longitudinal direction, each of the section region 2 being a unit for a mounting process. Each of the section regions 2 includes substrate patterns 3 which are in a one-to-one correspondence with IC cards and which are printed at regular intervals in the longitudinal and lateral directions, and positioning marks 4 (hereinafter, referred to as “base material marks”) which are printed at the four corners of each section region 2. The positional relationship between the substrate patterns 3 is determined relative to these base material marks 4. In the mounting process, the base material marks 4 are detected and used as the reference in recognizing the position of each substrate pattern 3 on the basis of the predetermined positional relationship, thereby mounting chips on each substrate pattern 3.
The mounting process for each section region 2 mainly involves an adhesive application process for applying adhesive to prescribed positions in the substrate patterns 3; a temporary crimp process for positioning chips on the positions where the adhesive has been applied and temporarily crimping the chips thereto; and a main crimp process for bonding the temporarily crimped chips to the base material. In some cases, chips are positioned on positions where the adhesive has been applied and directly bonded thereto without dividing between the temporary crimp process and the main crimp process. In any case, in each process, the base material marks 4 in the section regions 2 are firstly detected, and the position of each substrate pattern 3 is recognized by using the base material marks 4 as the reference, thereby applying the adhesive or crimping the chips.
However, the conventional example has the following problems.
Even when each substrate pattern 3 is printed with high precision relative to the base material marks 4 as reference, if the base material to be processed expands and contracts under the influence of temperature or humidity, error occurs in the positional relationship between the base substrate marks 4 and the substrate patterns 3, thereby deteriorating the precision of chip mounting. In particular, when the base material to be processed is the plastic film base material 1, this tendency becomes remarkable. The same problem causes when the substrate patterns 3 have printing error. In order to solve this problem, it is considered that the substrate patterns 3 are detected in each process; however, this would cause another problem that the tact time of the device is delayed.
In view of the circumstances, the present invention has an object of providing a device and method for mounting chips with high precision and at a high rate by detecting and adjusting positional deviation between substrate patterns due to the expansion and contraction of the base material to be processed.